Activist James Farmer eating at a southern lunch counter 1965.Jim Crow segregation laws required that blacks sit apart from white customers in restaurants. In her memoir, singer Diana Ross, who grew up in Detroit, remembers a trip she made with her siblings to visit relatives in Bessemer, Alabama, in the 1950s. “I dimly recall seeing signs on water fountains, in waiting rooms, and at movie theatres: WHITE, COLORED.” She goes on to say, “There were so many indignities black people endured; everything was separate and unequal.” Interviews with southerners indicate that African-American customers and restaurant employees did not simply capitulate to Jim Crow conditions in the South but employed what one scholar calls “infrapolitics.” In the case of segregated restaurants, infrapolitics included such everyday forms of resistance as theft and passing. For example, blacks working the “coloured” window at white-owned restaurants regularly gave away food or discounted the food sold to blacks.
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